I had to benchmark an EC2 instance to see whether a database could be safely moved to it. It is a good practice, which helps avoiding surprises when an instance or its storage are allocated in a noisy neighborhood, where the neighbors use so much resources that it affects the performance of our MySQL database. It is understandable that one can never get very reliable results on EC2, this is a shared environment after all, and that some fluctuations should be expected, however it is still good to know the numbers. I started my benchmarks and everything seemed fine at first, but then sometimes statistics I was getting started looking quite odd.

I was running the benchmarks on a High-CPU Extra Large Instance and couldn’t see any reliability in the results at all. I mean, in one moment I was getting poor throughput and horrible response times only to see it improve a lot a few minutes later. I ruled out a possibility that it could be …

Yesterday (4/19) I attended the AWS Summit in NYC (http://aws.amazon.com/aws-summit-2012/nyc).

I'm a big fan and also a heavy user of AWS especially S3, EC2, and naturally, RDS. In every point in time I have several dozens of AWS machines running for me out there in the East region, and in some cases when we do some special benchmarks and tests, number of EC2 and RDS machines can easily reach 3-digit. As I said, I'm a fan...

A few quotes I was able to catch and document on my laptop, on my laps...:
"When you develop an app for facebook, you must be prepared (and be afraid) that to your party, not noone will show up, but everybody will show up!" So true! Simple and true. We all want to succeed, to have success with our app. We have to think about scaling from day 1.
"Database was bottleneck for building of sophisticated apps. This is …

Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more :

I am very pleased to say that earlier today, SkySQL announced it has raised $4 Million in Series A Round Funding.

Let me post the main part of the press release here:

SAN JOSE – April 18, 2012 – SkySQL, the first choice in affordable database solutions for the MySQL® and MariaDB® databases in the enterprise and the cloud, today announces that the company has raised $4 million in Series A funding from a number of investors, including OnCorps, an elite peer-based community of veteran technology investors and advisors committed to bringing better, cost-disruptive technologies into the mainstream. Also funding the round are European investors including Finnish Industry Investment Ltd., Spintop Ventures and Open Ocean Capital.

SkySQL will primarily use the investment to fund growth in its new product development, including adding critical positions. This is the …

  Plug-in to Vegas The program focuses on key topics such as high availability, virtualization, security, business intelligence, Exadata, Cloud Computing and internals.  Recently added, we switched around the schedule to include the Thursday Deep Dive, Avoiding Downtime through the Maximum … Continue reading →

Wow! A lot has changed since the last MySQL conference I blogged about in 2007.

MySQL has been acquired twice: once as MySQL by Sun and the second time around bundled with Sun when Oracle bought Sun. The conference is no longer organized by O’Reilly but by Percona. And the MySQL database itself has changed — we were talking about new features in MySQL 5.1, which wasn’t released yet, along with Falcon (where did it go?). 5.1 has long since been released as has 5.5, and we’re now talking about 5.6 instead of 6.0. There was no “Cloud” on the horizon, nor was there MariaDB, XtraDB, Drizzle, Schooner, or any of the other offshoots of MySQL, all of which are creating a new buzz around the product.

Yet, one thing remains constant: the vibrant community around MySQL. In spite of all the changes in technology, ownership, versions, …

http://collaborate12.ioug.org   Double Down at COLLABORATE 12- The IOUG Forum with Two Ways to Save- and a Chance to Win! The user-driven Oracle event of the year is fast-approaching, and IOUG wants you to make youreducational experience a sure bet. Between … Continue reading →

Read the original article at A History lesson for Cloud Detractors

We've all seen cloud computing discussed ad nauseam on blogs, on Twitter, Quora, Stack Exchange, your mom’s Facebook page... you get the idea. The tech bloggers and performance experts often pipe in with their graphs and statistics showing clearly that dollar-for-dollar, cloud hosted virtual servers can’t compete with physical servers in performance, so why is everyone pushing them? It's just foolhardy, they say.

On the other end, management and their bean counters would simply roll their eyes saying this is why the tech guys aren't running the business.

Selena and I gave a talk on the various issues of running databases “in the cloud” at the recent linux.conf.au in Ballarat. Video is up, embedded below:

It’s almost the end of the year – that means holiday cards, shopping, cooking, parties, and the inevitable year-end top lists (including gems like this one).

In the spirit of end of year list making, we fed our 60+ blogs this year through Google Analytics to find out what our own top ten blogs were (outside of product announcements). So if you missed an episode of the View (TokuView that is) we’ve got a Tokutek Top Ten for you (spoiler alert – they are mostly technical):

10. Cage Match: OldSQL, NoSQL and NewSQL – References to mud …